How to Improve Your Conversion Rate: Five Essential Steps to Success

Getting people to visit your online store is only half the battle. Convincing visitors to hit that ‘Buy Now’ button is where the magic really happens.

With online shopping at an all-time high, there’s never been a better time to improve your e-commerce conversion rate. Here are some foolproof conversion optimization tips you can start implementing today.

Attract the Right Customers

Search engine optimization is primarily a tool for increasing traffic, but it also has an important role to play in online conversions. There’s no point in attracting a high volume of the wrong customers – this will result in an incredibly low conversion rate.

Ideally, visitors to your site should arrive there with the intention of making a purchase, and you need to be selling exactly what they are in the market for. Plus, your ideal customer can only find their way to your site if you have a robust and specific SEO strategy.

Provide Detailed Descriptions

When it comes to improving product descriptions, don’t skimp on the details. Give your potential buyer as much information as you can about your product or service, and back it up with high-quality imagery and specifications (where applicable). You can even get creative with video and augmented reality to further demonstrate the features and benefits of your product.

The good news? High-converting product descriptions do more than inform. It tells a story for the potential buyer – one where they are the main character. It speaks to their specific issues, needs, and desires.  Put simply, your descriptions should not only be detailed, but relevant, engaging, and unique to your business.

The tone of the copy should always be consistent with the personality and style of your brand, which in the long run, will help to boost your conversion rate.

Include Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews inspire confidence in your potential customers. It’s the only way to demonstrate the quality of what you’re offering from an unbiased perspective.

According to a study undertaken by Reevoo, a selection of user-generated reviews can result in an 18% uplift in sales. Meanwhile, a study by Fan & Fuel found that 92% of customers would hesitate to make a purchase if there are no customer reviews, and 97% said that they factor reviews into buying decisions.

Improve Site Navigation

Is there anything more frustrating than a poorly designed site? Nowadays, shoppers spend a mere matter of milliseconds forming an opinion on your online store. If they can’t see what they are looking for immediately, they’ll be hitting that back button faster than you can say ‘add to basket’.

Make buying easy for your potential customers and skyrocket your conversion rate by ensuring everything they need is at the touch of a button. This means including an intuitive search function that offers suggestions as you type, as well as a simplified navigational menu. If you’ve got lots of different products to sell, be sure to categorize them.

Keep your homepage clean, concise, and inviting, with stand-out calls to action. Do away with unnecessary distractions; if it doesn’t relate to the product or service you’re offering, it doesn’t belong. Similarly, you should make purchasing easy for your customers by removing unnecessary forms or the necessity to create an account before buying, and including one-touch payment options.

Offer an Incentive

Let’s face it, everybody loves a freebie. Providing purchase incentives such as free shipping or a complimentary promotional gift is a surefire way to boost e-commerce conversions.

If your budget is tight, increase the price of the product slightly so that shipping can be offered for free. You can also provide a money-back guarantee to give customers peace of mind that your product will perform the way it should. Alternatively, you could make a free PDF guide relating to your product that will be made available for download after purchase.

Incentivizing the customer can also be as simple as enhancing your call-to-action copy. Give them a reason to press that button. A simple ‘Buy Now!’ is versatile, but generic, but it works wonders for your conversion rate. Make sure your call to actions are specific to the customer, their problems, or your product, and you’re giving them even more of a reason to make that all-important click.